Читать книгу Thoughts on South Africa онлайн

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Something is to be said for both views, more especially for the second. At the present day the Taal is the only tongue of the many thousands of Half-castes which have resulted from the union of the Boer with his slaves; and it is exactly such a broken form of speech as does arise, when a large body of adults are suddenly obliged to learn and use a foreign tongue, as was the case with the slaves. But neither of these theories seems to us wholly to cover the ground. In the Southern States of America for a hundred years slave nurses brought up English children, but not the slightest effect on their English speech was produced, and nowhere in America is a purer English spoken than by the descendants of the Southern planters. Even allowing that, being uncultured, the forefathers of the Boer might more easily have let their speech slip than was the case with the more cultured planters, it still seems unlikely that a people so rigidly and exceptionally conservative as the Boer has shown himself to be, even in the smallest details of daily life, during his two hundred years in South Africa, should suddenly and entirely have dropped his own pure language and accepted his speech from the hands of his despised dependents.